Equivalent to "Add/Remove Programs" aka "Programs and Features" Controls???

drdocument, I respectfully, completely disagree with you.

The average Mac user has no clue as to what the Library folder is for. Nor would they be able to sort through it all to find the five locations where the tons of crap might be stored.

Lets take several examples. Here's some programs that I have installed that are quite typical of Mac users:

Garage Band
iTunes
Adobe CS3
Microsoft Office

NONE of these programs can be deleted easily. Garbage Band stores its garbage in numerous unintuitive places:

/Users/me/Music/Garageband
/Library/Audio/Plug-ins
/Library/Application Support/Garage Band/
/Users/me/Library/Preferences/

Further, it's not always clear whether the files you are deleting are used by just one application, or multiple applications from that same company (or even other companies). I often feel unsure if I'm deleting something from /Library/Audio/Plug-ins or /Library/Application Support/Adobe because... is it used only by Photoshop? What if I just wanted to uninstall InDesign and I no longer have the original install disk because, lets say, I sold it?

It should not fall upon the user to play sleuth and hunt down the myriad places that these apps store things on the drive!!!

There should be an EASY Control Panel in System Preferences that lets you uninstall any program off your drive. I seriously don't think that this would hamper application development or make the system run slower or be kludgy. Besides, when has Apple ever taken the path of making things harder on users because they were afraid by making it easier, it would slow down the computer???

If anything the opposite has always been true.

Even a shareware app that just has one application file and no other files on the drive should be able to be uninstalled with confidence by a control panel. Since, how do you KNOW it didn't put another file somewhere, even a preferences file? God only knows how many preferences files are on my drive that I don't need because they never got erased when I uninstalled the app. It would take me days to comb through that mess, especially since the arcane and unintuitive preference file naming scheme used by OS X does not use plain english but rather uses ridiculous un-Mac-like names like "com.unsanity.hoseyoursystem.preference"... whatever happened to "Microsoft Word Preferences" and "Adobe Photoshop Preferences" -- nice Mac-like filenames?!?!??!

I'm tired of the PC-ization of the Mac, the further and further making it more complicated, having apps store more crap in more different places. Having multiple Library folders is just a nightmare from an ease-of-use standpoint, though I know it's necessary for a multi-user OS. But there ought to be a way to have a "single-user" mode that would eliminate the Users directory all together and just store everything at the root level of the HD, rather than having all my documents buried 10 levels deep into the drive.

Anyway the point is you are wrong. The way it is set up makes it harder on users -- even seasoned users like me -- when we want to cleanly uninstall an application with confidence. It means tons of extra time sifting through the labrynthine unix crap. I hate it! Where has "user friendly" gone??

Besides I would never trust a third-party shareware program to uninstall things. How would i know that it knew what to do? Plus it adds extra expense to the OS, for a feature that has been standard on Windows for what seems like 10 years!

When will we finally get this feature? 2020?

You don't have to have a "registry" to achieve what I'm talking about.

All you would need is that programs, when they install, would leave a .pkg file in the "Receipts" folder (which, gasp, most of them already do!!) that lists all the files they install on your drive.

90% of what's necessary for a feature like this to be implemented is already present in Mac OS X -- as evidenced by the existence of simple shareware apps that do it for you.

I'm just saying that Apple should build this feature into the OS itself, and ask application developers to be responsible about their apps playing nice with listing the files they install on your drive in the .pkg file in the Receipts folder. That would not be too much to ask!

And I'm sorry that you don't care if 5GB of files are still left on your drive after just dragging the app to the trash (like there would be in the case of Garbage Band).

But some people, like me, actually do care if there is a bunch of useless crap using up valuable space on their drives!

Hey, I'm not saying that it should be done exactly like in Windows.

It should be done the Mac way.

For example, the OS could automatically ask you when you drag the app to the trash if you want to delete all associated files such as preferences, application support, etc. and give them in a check-down list, with the total KB of each item. It could be done in a way that was much more elegant than Winblows.

I'm just saying the way it is now, even Windows' way of doing it is much easier than on a Mac. Since with Windows I can install some software, try it out, if I don't like it, easily uninstall it without wondering if there's weird files remaining to litter my drive. Having checked my Vista partition... it does not seem as though the stuff I uninstalled yesterday left any traces of it.

But the point is just how to improve the Mac and make it easier to use.